Operations Research methodologies in urban air mobility and their potential applications in healthcare services

Recent advances in electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) suggest that soon, these vehicles could safely and efficiently transport people and cargo in urban areas. Therefore, in the next years, urban air mobility (UAM) can become an important alternative to overcome ground traffic congestion, especially in big cities. Over the last years, there has been enormous interest from high-tech companies in developing such technologies and enabling urban air transportation services. One of the well-known air services is package delivery. The big tech company Amazon, with its drone courier branch Prime Air, has been testing since 2016 drone-package delivery. Currently, the company has multiple development centers over the world and has made promising advances in the field (Amazon, 2019). Additionally, there are multiple initiatives and partnerships between governments to contribute to the creation of a market for UAM services. To implement effective UAM systems in cities exists three significant challenges to overcome shortly. Firstly, new technologies and procedures should be developed to tackle safety issues such as avoiding ground obstacles and other aircraft vehicles. Secondly, standards for communication, navigation, and surveillance (CNS) systems have to be adequately designed for urban aircraft. Thirdly, methods and tools to sequence, schedule, and space UAM vehicles at constrained environments should be developed (Thipphavong et al., 2018). Rosser, Vignesh, Terwilliger, & Parker (2018) concluded that urban aircrafts such as drones have a vast potential in improving delivery operations like pharmaceutical or emergency medical transportation. However, great research efforts should be made in the next years to incorporate this paradigm to health operations successfully. This research project focuses on the third challenge from an Operations Research (OR) approach. Transportation, location and inventory decisions in UAM can be tackled using OR methodologies. Additionally, there have been significant advancements in air traffic management (ATM) in airports and airspace derived from OR applications over the last decades (Barnhart, Belobaba, & Odoni, 2003). Problems such as aircraft landing scheduling, fleet planning, aircraft take-off scheduling, gate assignment, or trajectory planning have been faced successfully using OR methodologies. Our hypothesis is that some concepts and approximations from OR perspective in the classic ATM paradigm can be successfully adapted in the upcoming UAM problems. We argue that this represents an opportunity to produce relevant and impactful research to face emerging problems of urban air technologies, especially in its operational logistics and applications.